Sunday, March 25, 2012

I closed a ticket today, a very minor one: the programmer's manual, which is a Texinfo document wasn't building on my Fedora 14 system on an Intel Mac Mini.
Some months ago I decided to upgrade the Mini to Fedora 16 and that was the end of the Mini. Long story short: Fedora switched to the GRUB2 boot loader and after the distro is installed on the Mini it won't reboot. GRUB2 couldn't find the kernel, even when I explicitly passed the path on boot.
The Mini has a flaky CDROM drive so installing anything means trying over and over until the installation process survives with no bad reads from the DVD disc. I should just pry the Mini open at this point and install a new optical drive.
Tonight while doing another task (several, really) I kept trying to reinstall FC on the Mini, and the sixth or seventh try went without a hitch. Finally. I started "yum groupinstall"ing things to get the system fleshed out with the tools I need. It's almost there now.
So I git cloned Waverous off Google Code and got the manual to build. Finally! It's not much but at least that's one ticket closed and the project inches forward. I still wanna try branching and doing a radical rewrite of the structs into classes just for kicks.